“No,” was all her answer to that.  The plant, she thought, was dead; she had not, indeed, paid much attention to it of late; but she showed it to David, and he said it would revive if more carefully tended.  He also told her its rather pathetic history, which was new to Grizel, and of the talk at the wedding which had led to Tommy’s taking pity on it.  “Fellow-feeling, I suppose,” he said lightly; “you see, they both blossomed prematurely.”

The words were forgotten by him as soon as spoken; but Grizel sat on with them, for they were like a friend—­or was it an enemy?—­who had come to tell her strange things.  Yes, the doctor was right.  Now she knew why Tommy had loved this plant.  Of the way in which he would sit looking wistfully at it, almost nursing it, she had been told by Aaron; he had himself begged her to tend it lovingly.  Fellow-feeling!  The doctor was shrewder than he thought.

Well, what did it matter to her?  All that day she would do nothing for the plant, but in the middle of the night she rose and ran to it and hugged it, and for a time she was afraid to look at it by lamplight, lest Tommy was dead.  Whether she had never been asleep that night, or had awakened from a dream, she never knew, but she ran to the plant, thinking it and Tommy were as one, and that they must die together.  No such thought had ever crossed his mind, but it seemed to her that she had been told it by him, and she lit her fire to give the plant warmth, and often desisted, to press it to her bosom, the heat seemed to come so reluctantly from the fire.  This idea that his fate was bound up with that of the plant took strange possession of the once practical Grizel; it was as if some of Tommy’s nature had passed into her to help her break the terrible monotony of the days.

And from that time there was no ailing child more passionately tended than the plant, and as spring advanced it began once more to put forth new leaves.

And Grizel also seemed glorified again.  She was her old self.  Dark shapes still lingered for her in the Den, but she avoided them, and if they tried to enter into her, she struggled with them and cast them out.  As she saw herself able to fight and win once more, her pride returned to her, and one day she could ask David, joyously, to give her a present of the old doctor’s chair.  And she could kneel by its side and say to it, “You can watch me always; I am just as I used to be.”

Seeing her once more the incarnation of vigor and content, singing gaily to his child, and as eager to be at her duties betimes as a morning in May, Corp grunted with delight, and was a hero for not telling her that it was he who had passed Tommy the word.  For, of course, Tommy had done it all.

“Somebody has found a wy, Grizel!” he would say, chuckling, and she smiled an agreement.

“And yet,” says he, puzzled, “I’ve watched, and you hinna haen a letter frae him.  It defies the face o’ clay to find out how he has managed it.  Oh, the crittur!  Ay, I suppose you dinna want to tell me what it is that has lichted you up again?”